a daily blog on well-being and how to feel better by Mark Barger Elliott…

“Christmastide” is a song our family cherishes. The lyric asks that “truth and love and hope abide this Christmastide,” a prayer that captures the essence of what unfolded beneath a Bethlehem star. Here is one version of the song. Wishing you and yours a blessed Christmastide.

We are spending some time over the holidays next to a bay and noticed three different kinds of birds on the beach. There were Western Gulls which sat in groups on the sand, maybe 20-30 feet from the rolling surf. Marbled Godwits raced along the water’s edge trying to avoid the waves while poking for food with…

“Draw all the lines to that true point,” instructed painter Andrea Pozzo in 1693, “(which is) the glory of God.”  It’s fascinating to consider what is the true point of our work.  To where – and towards what – do our efforts converge? Is it for the glory of God? For our own glory? To…

Our family roots for the New England Patriots, an American football team who won six Super Bowls from 2002-2019. But after quarterback Tom Brady left, the Patriots have been mostly mediocre, and this season, terrible. In a recent game the fans and analysts even wondered if instead of doing everything he could to win, coach…

I’ve been reading a wonderful book of essays by John Berger called Portraits where he makes the fascinating observation artists are caught in a trap when painting themselves while looking into a mirror, because what they will end up painting is the reaction they see to viewing their face. To attempt to mute this second…

I recently came across an intriguing idea attributed to the poet John Keats called “negative capability.” As the Poetry Foundation explains, “in his letters, [Keats] writes about beauty, the imagination, and the concept of ‘Negative Capability’ – ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’”…